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Topic: official Fiona Apple thread (Read 45243 times)

Having listened to the whole thing, it's really not too much different from the original. That Brion's version of Ext. Machine kicks off the album is sort of disconcerting - because it sounds so good in its finished form (as Sickfins mentioned) that it makes you wonder what the rest of the album would have sounded like if they had finished it together. As for the rest of it, some songs are worse, some are better, but for the most part the difference wasn't huge. If you didn't like the album to begin with (P), you won't like this. If you did like it - well, you'll either enjoy it well enough or else just stick to the bootlegs. I like the bootleg more - but I'll still be buying a copy of this version, because I'm not a hypocrite.

First reaction: Big and I am a fan. What is going on with these tunes? Yeah, she sure can rhyme, I suppose. Personally, I think there was still much more exploring to be done. There are bits and pieces that I did enjoy. A second spin will definately follow at some point.

A free Fiona returnsThe tumultuous saga of her new album behind her, the singer is happy to be back from a difficult six-year break.By Richard Cromelin, Times Staff Writer

Fiona Apple sat bolt upright, her hands clenched on the table in front of her, her pale green eyes darting nervously back and forth.

No, the notoriously volatile singer-songwriter wasn't having one of her meltdowns. She was just using body language to illustrate how her approach to life has changed.

"Before, I'm kind of like this," she said as she maintained her tense posture. Then she eased back slowly and luxuriantly into her chair in the lobby of a posh Santa Monica hotel. "Right now, I'm kind of like this. I'm riding with the waves a little bit more now instead of trying to control them."

Given the tumultuous saga of her new album "Extraordinary Machine," which comes out Tuesday on Epic Records, the last thing you'd expect to find right now is a relaxed, "more solid" Fiona Apple. But there she was, animated but easygoing during an afternoon interview this week.

That's good news and bad news for her unusually fervent fans, who dote on her like a fragile sibling but also are drawn to her mercurial nature, her public outspokenness, the raw-nerves emotion of her quirky, confessional pop-cabaret music.

Apple, 28, has had plenty of time for psychological makeover. It's been six years since her last album, "When the Pawn ... ," a period of pure rest and relaxation followed by a high drama involving creative disorientation and conflicts between art and commerce, with a cast of characters that included record producers, label executives and activist fans who organized a "Free Fiona" campaign.

It got so bad at one point that Apple actually quit.

"I was just standing in my kitchen, and I called up my manager and I said, 'OK just tell them I'm not gonna record anymore,' " Apple said. " 'Don't call me back, I'm gonna unplug my phone because I'll doubt what I do if you give me five seconds to doubt it ' I walked over to my friend's house and went, 'OK, I just quit.... I feel great, it's done.' "

Apple's post-"Pawn" period had begun more placidly, with the singer taking a long break after completing her touring for the 1999 album. Eventually, her friend and producer Jon Brion persuaded her to start work on a new album, even though Apple wasn't sure the songs she'd been developing were ready to be recorded.

They had some tracks to play for Epic executives in mid-2003. Brion said at the time that the label rejected them as uncommercial, comments that sparked the fans' grass-roots campaign to get the record released. But Apple, who remained silent during the controversy, says now that she was uneasy with the music.

"For some reason my brain stopped working at a certain point, and I wasn't able to pick out what I liked or didn't like," she said this week. "I had no idea what I wanted, because I think that I wasn't ready to do it again, and I think that I just shut down....

"I didn't know the songs well enough when we started to record them, so I just wasn't able to be the captain. And as a result it just got a little bit confused and the songs got away from me."

Things stayed in limbo for a while, then Apple started redoing the songs with producer Mike Elizondo, a Dr. Dre associate. His simpler approach brought the work into focus for her, but then she was slapped in the face by word from Epic that they could record only one song at a time, with the label checking up on each one.

It was an insulting restriction to put on an established, free-flying artist, and that's when Apple quit, disappearing for several months until media coverage of the "Free Fiona" drive and the leak of the Brion recordings to the Internet and radio created a little leverage for her.

Though relations with Epic were restored (Apple says she later learned that the one-track-at-a-time order was a miscommunication) it still took some doing to get her back in the studio. She says if it weren't for her friend Brian Kehew, who promised to participate and is credited as a co-producer, there might have been no "Extraordinary Machine."

"Even then I was feeling ... 'I don't need this, I'm gonna go do something else with my life,' " Apple said with a flash of the old fire. Why step back in the ... quicksand again?"

In the sun-dappled lobby, Apple seemed to be glad that she had. She's proud of the album, whose songs focus on romantic conflict and breakup — she said that after reviews started appearing she called her ex-boyfriend, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, and assure him that they weren't all about him.

But there's also the closing "Waltz (Better Than Fine)," which she says is "all about the importance of doing nothing," and the title song, a manifesto of self-reliance directed at "people in my life that just are worried about me a little bit too much."

So what did the singer learn about herself and her art from the album ordeal?

"I'm not gonna sit here and say, 'Well next time I'm gonna wait till I'm ready.' Because it was all worth it.... I'm happy that I wasn't ready and that we made those recordings and that I went through all that stuff, I'm happy that I got the opportunity to make a decision like 'OK I quit,' and to know that faced with a decision like that I went the right way — not for my career but for myself.

"I'm glad that I got to see that if you do things for the right reason, pretty much most of the time things turn out the right way. And even if they don't turn out exactly how you want them, you still feel good about yourself."

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

At wave level, everything exists as a contradiction. Everything is existing in more than one stage/place at any given moment. Everything must move/vibrate and constantly change to exist. Everything, including buildings, mountains, oceans and thoughts.

mod listed a bunch of sites with the bootleg version on Page 4. Some might still be active.

I think they're all dead.... but I could send it to someone through e-mail if they need it.

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"As a matter of fact I only work with the feeling of something magical, something seemingly significant. And to keep it magical I don't want to know the story involved, I just want the hypnotic effect of it somehow seeming significant without knowing why." - Len Lye

NEW YORK — Fiona Apple is curled up on a couch, fighting back tears. But it's not what you think.

When the diminutive, doe-eyed singer/songwriter rose to fame as a teenager in the late '90s, many perceived her as angry, troubled or at least colorfully neurotic. Her precocious lyrics reveled in baiting and scorning lovers, while in interviews, she regaled reporters with accounts of having been raped as a girl.

Apple, now 28, clearly hasn't lost her flair for drama. But these days, she is more likely to attract it than be consumed by it.

Consider the story behind Extraordinary Machine, Apple's first new CD in six years. Recording sessions began in 2002, with Apple and longtime producer Jon Brion working on and off. Apple says both she and her label were less than thrilled with the results.

"Sony didn't think there was a hit," says the singer, who is signed to Epic Records, a division of Sony Music. "And I wanted to redo some songs."

Producer Mike Elizondo (Eminem, 50 Cent) came on board, and Apple says the label suggested "that I could maybe hand in one song at a time. But I thought that was an incredibly bad idea, because it implied that if they didn't like what I handed in, they could try to change it. Or they could say, 'You can't have any more money, and we're shelving it.' "

(Epic spokeswoman Lois Najarian says: "Things were definitely miscommunicated during the time when Fiona was switching producers, and unfortunately she was led to believe that the label was only allowing her to record one new version at a time. That was surely not the case.")

Recalls Apple: "At that point I said, 'I quit.' " But an anonymous admirer had other ideas. While on her new computer one day, Apple discovered that some of her early, Brion-produced tracks had been leaked online. "It was the weirdest feeling, like somebody had taken my diary and printed it."

The singer soon learned that fans had started a "Free Fiona" movement and sent letters, apples and drawings of apples to Sony's offices. "I remember thinking it was ridiculous and funny. Here I was, jobless, sitting around in my bathrobe watching TV. But then I started crying, because I thought, 'Oh, my God, these people care so much.' I feel so moved by that."

Apple's gift to the faithful, the finished version of Machine, arrives Tuesday, and the album — including the biting single Parting Gift— confirms that she hasn't lost her flair for confessional candor. "I started writing songs and continue to write because it's how I deal with my life. I don't make up stories."

She prefers not to discuss in specific terms how ex-boyfriends such as filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson influenced her lyrics. "I've been in other relationships since Paul. He's been a big part of my life, and he's a very good friend now. But the songs are informed by all my relationships. There are certain lines that are directly about one person or situation, so directly that I'm sure those people recognize it. And that may be why I do this, to get my point across — though not in a mean way."

The singer won't say whether anyone special is keeping her company these days, other than her dog, Janet, a pit bull mix she took in "because no one claimed her or wanted her." She has resolved to forge ahead with her career for the time being.

"For a while I was looking forward to having to get another job," Apple says. "I had this fantasy about applying to this place in upstate New York, Green Chimneys. They do occupational therapy with kids, using farm animals. I thought that was something I could be passionate about. But music just kept on coming back."

Fiona Apple, the soul-baring singer who hasn't released an album since 1999, wishes she had a more compelling explanation for her absence. "The truth is that I haven't been doing anything that interesting," she said, shrugging one afternoon late last week. "I got off the road last time and I just felt like not writing and not doing anything for a long time."

Ms. Apple will finally be back next week with the release of "Extraordinary Machine," the third album in her decade-long career. And judging from the 500 fans who flocked to the Virgin Megastore in Union Square in Manhattan on Tuesday to hear her sing, her return is none too soon.

Ms. Apple attained cause-célèbre status earlier this year when fans pressured her record company, Sony, to release the album, an early, unfinished version of which had been leaked on the Internet.

She called her decision to step back into the limelight a "really big experiment," given her past public struggles with popular success. Will the touring, television appearances and photo shoots cause her to "freak out again," she wondered? Or will she manage to find some pleasure in it all?

While promoting her first album her attitude was, "Please like me, please understand me," Ms. Apple, 28, said chuckling. "The second time was: 'Please don't misunderstand me again. Please understand me this time.' And this time it's really about me taking something that's been so stressful in the past and making it joyful. I don't want to be suffering all the time."

Suffering - Ms. Apple has made a cottage industry of it. She even addresses her penchant for pain on the title track of "Extraordinary Machine": "I seem to you to seek a new disaster everyday."

But she writes: "I mean to prove I mean to move in my own way, and say,/I've been getting along for long before you came into play."

In 1996 she made her debut with "Tidal," which sold three million copies and won a Grammy. Her second effort, "When the Pawn. ..." - the unabridged title is 90 words long - was hailed by critics but proved a commercial disappointment.

It did not help that Ms. Apple had a reputation for being difficult, a tortured soul with attitude to spare. In one of her more infamous tantrums, she berated audience members at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards ceremony for worshiping celebrities. A Manhattan concert in 2000 was cut short when the singer, upset over sound difficulties, began sobbing uncontrollably onstage. Ms. Apple, who admits to being emotional ("it runs in my family"), said she was cast as a troubled loose cannon by the media because controversy makes great headlines.

"I was the right girl for the part," she conceded. "I cried a lot. I said a lot of stuff. There were lots of great rumors about me. Everything I did was put in bold print and italics."

It is difficult to believe that this tiny sliver of a woman once caused such a big commotion. Dressed in a floor-length peasant skirt, T-shirt and faded navy-blue hoodie, a genial Ms. Apple spoke in sprawling, uninterrupted sentences as she sat in a restaurant at her Midtown hotel. Thoughtful and introspective, she was all too willing to have her haunting blue-silver eyes look inward.

During her sabbatical, she said, she would often sit in her backyard in Venice, Calif., thinking and playing with pine cones. "I was making little pine-cone people with razor blades," Ms. Apple said, raking her fingers through her wavy brown hair. "That's all I did."

Her inertia did not sit well with some in her immediate circle. They accused Ms. Apple of being lazy, crazy and unproductive, she said. "It really hurt a couple of close relationships of mine," said Ms. Apple, who split with her boyfriend Paul Thomas Anderson, the film director, three years ago. "It infuriated me because they couldn't believe that when I'm sitting and thinking that's how I work."

Several years ago she decided that she was ready to begin recording again and called on Jon Brion, who produced "When the Pawn. ..." Their collaboration, while smooth before, was shaky this time. "Jon would play me stuff and I wouldn't be able to tell what I liked and what I didn't like," Ms. Apple said. After emerging from a deep funk, she eventually decided to rerecord her songs with the producer Mike Elizondo, who has worked with Dr. Dre.

According to Ms. Apple, things were going well until executives at Sony began asking her to submit individual songs for their approval. Only then would they determine how much more recording money she would receive. Sony had already sunk nearly $800,000 into recording the original version of "Extraordinary Machine."

Lois Najarian, a representative for Sony, denies this and blamed Ms. Apple's perception of events on miscommunication. "That was surely not the case," Ms. Najarian said.

Unhappy with what she termed an "unlivable" arrangement, Ms. Apple threatened to abandon the project.

When the Brion-produced version of "Extraordinary Machine" showed up on the Internet earlier this year, Ms. Apple, upset that her unfinished work was available, thought Sony would scrap the album. "Who is going to give me money to make songs that are already out there?" she recalled thinking at the time.

Little did Ms. Apple know that a group of fans was pleading with Sony to release her album, which they thought had been shelved. Both Sony and Ms. Apple say it was not. On the Web site www.freefiona.com they railed against the "corporate giant" standing between them and their beloved.

"Please give us Fiona and we'll give you money back," read one poem posted on the site. Hundreds of foam apples were sent to the company, and in January a dedicated band of protesters, led by the Free Fiona founder Dave Muscato, stood outside the Madison Avenue offices of Sony BMG chanting, "We want Fiona."

She is quick to credit her freefiona fans with her comeback. "It's good to know that if you organize you can make change, because that's certainly not what I was doing," Ms. Apple said, "I was walking away."

Fiona Apple will begin her first tour in several years Nov. 22 in Portland, Ore. The dates come in support of her third album, "Extraordinary Machine," which is released today (Oct. 4) via Epic. The set already is the top-seller at Apple's iTunes Music Store, according to the label.

Apple admits she is apprehensive about going back on tour after such a long layoff. "I'm slightly terrified," she tells Billboard. "If I'm going to go out and do shows, at a certain point, I'll love it. The first two weeks, you're getting used to it. The thing that I'm terrified about [is that] I'm going to want to include songs from the other albums in the show. I haven't tried to play any of my old songs in years. I'm so afraid of not knowing them."

Apple's touring band has yet to be announced. In August, album co-producer Mike Elizondo told Billboard.com he had "offered to put a band together as well as be a part of that band myself on bass. I've already put out some feelers to local musicians in L.A. that would probably comprise the band I'm thinking of."

On Thursday, Apple will perform and sign autographs at Tower Records in West Hollywood, Calif.Here are Fiona Apple's tour dates:

Man, not even a stop in Austin? I remember back in 2000 she cancelled her tour the very day the Dallas tickets were going on sale.

I bought the album today and have listened to it once and, hearing it for the first time in full fidelity on a good speaker system, it's wonderful. The only real casualty, I've decided, is Better Version Of Me.

i haven't got a good chance to listen to it yet.i did watch the Largo performances with JB on the Dual Disc and those are very good. (oh how i wish i could see one of JB's concerts there!).i downloaded 3 or so of the early versions. the song that really stood out of those is what i think is track 5. did the other version have a lot of bells?i just remember that being the coolest thing ever.

Are you talking about Tymps (Sick In The Head)? When I wrote below that the only casualty is Better Version Of Me, what I really meant was this song, which comes right after it ( I guess, after that first listen, my head mixed the production on one with the other). The bells are gone, replaced by really annoying synthetic vibes or something.

Oh Sailor, Parting Gift and (especially) Oh Well are so damn good, though...

yeah, that song. the early version was titled Used to Love Him, I think.after listening to it more today i love this version as well. i just love the songwriting and the lyrics. then again, i haven't heard the early version in a long time since my computer's been down.